Businesses rely on the electronic communication of information using communication links to perform business processes. In the past, for example, businesses have used Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) networks to buy, sell, and trade information and goods. EDI defines a set of business processes performed by software interfaces, translators, and mapping protocols that must adhere to strictly-defined EDI standards to communicate a business document from one business to another, Several national and international organizations oversee, maintain, and enhance these EDI standards.
The rate of change of business processes, however, is increasing due to such technology innovations as the Internet. The EDI solution to this problem has been to create multiple versions of its standards. Therefore, there is no one true standard for performing particular business processes, but rather a set of different standard versions. EDI defines no mechanism for how these multiple versions should interoperate.
One solution to this problem is the development of an entire industry directed to translating between the different versions of EDI. Translation is a particularly integral part of EDI operation. Translators describe the relationship between the data elements in the underlying business application and the EDI standards (ANSI X12, EDIFACT, and others) by interpreting the information and putting it into a standard EDI document format. A drawback to this approach is that each business must maintain a mapping from its internal system to the EDI standard with which it is sending and/or receiving messages from another business. Whenever a business upgrades to a new version of an EDI standard for performing particular business processes, all of its business partners are immediately affected and must immediately upgrade their translators. Therefore prior systems are not stable or scalable.